Three days before Hamas fighters attacked Israel, in October 2023, the new president of Columbia University stood outside the low library and asked basic questions.
“What?” she asked. “Does the world need it from the great 21st century universities?”
President Nemat Shafik argued that there is a lot needed in the world. A strict thinker who was based on the big debates of the times. Researchers who can change society by breakthroughs. A university that expanded its mission far beyond the gates.
Seventeen months later, Dr. Shaffic is gone and the Trump administration offers a much different answer. The ideal Dr. Shafiq said many of them have been historically bankrolled by American taxpayers, but is under siege when President Trump links public funds to the government's vision of higher education.
The vision is narrow. Teach what you have to do, defend “American traditions and western civilizations,” prepare people for the workforce, limit protests and research.
“I had never had 46 years of higher education,” said Robert J. Jones, Prime Minister of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The consequences of this conflict over the purpose of higher education will shape American culture beyond generations. If the president recognizes his ambitions, many American universities (public and private universities in conservative and liberal states) can hollow and negate the backbone of national research efforts.
Two months after Trump's term, the university is facing a fired workers, imposing employment freezes, closures of labs and federal investigations. After the administration sent Colombia a list of requests and canceled its $400 million grants and contracts, university leaders across the country are scared of how the government will act financial forces that will affect curriculum, staffing and entry.
“Universities get hundreds of millions of dollars from hardworking taxpayers,” Trump said in a campaign video. “And now we are going to remove this anti-American insanity completely from our institutions. We are going to get a real education in America,” Trump declared his goal is to reclaim “from the radical left and once great educational institution.”
Other Republicans often spoke of their own frustration with higher education in a more measured language. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, frankly appealed at a hearing last month that the university “doesn't prepare students for success in the modern workforce.”
With presidential forces being expanded primarily by real Congress, Trump's challenges for academic freedom and First Amendment protection have not caused widespread, visible public outrage. The plain reality for university leaders is that Trump has administrative priority and academia has a surprising few voiced allies.
Fujirado (a man with an Ivy League degree) for higher education, led by Trump and Vice President JD Vance, is more furious than past conservative crusades against the country's elite academic institutions. But the administration has exploited the flaws that have torn the height of the system for years.
“His genius was Ronald J. Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University, resented, anxious, and “understanding and exploiting the vulnerability of voters who had already had 'important feelings,” Trump wrote in his 2021 book, What Universities owe Democracy.
Private votes conducted at universities show that many people believe that these nonprofit institutions are nothing. While university education almost always brings lifelong income to graduates, the rise in debt has made the value of degree a matter of discussion. Politicians have enthusiastically caricatured universities as a sanctuary of intolerance and “awakening” when the admission process can take into account race or support people well-connected.
“For Humanity” is the name of Yale University's $7 billion funding campaign, and often acknowledges that administrators and professors have not convened a digestible response, even to everyday criticism.
The university has become more accessible, built more diverse classes and handed over more financial aid. However, this summer, Prime Minister Jones, who will become president of Washington University, nevertheless described the higher education public relations strategy as “work in progress.”
Many leaders admit that the role of universities in American life is clear to them, but it is confusing to many.
“Higher education has always been able to stand up and evoke moral authority,” said Roger L. Geiger, a well-known professor emeritus at Penn State and a leading authority on the history of American universities. “What happened is that they simply lost their moral authority.”
In 2012, the Pew Research Center discovered that 26% of Americans believe that universities are having a negative impact on the United States. Even before the campus demonstrations that led to thousands of arrests last year, Pew reported that the figures had risen to 45%.
Much of Trump's higher education agenda during his first term empowered for commercial universities. But now, Trump is aiming to get a more clearer look at the culture and mission of major nonprofit universities. His tactics are believed by university officials and researchers, and believes that American higher education can be thrown forward. As Dr. Shafiq said, the university was “keeped separately from the world around it.”
American higher education assumes the Republic itself. Harvard, for example, was founded during the colonial era to educate clergy. While George Washington's idea of national universities never came to fruition, Abraham Lincoln found more success in pursuing the idea that higher education was entangled with American ambitions when he signed a measure that led to publicly funded land cultivation institutions.
Research became a university focus in the second half of the 19th century. Reliance on universities during and after World War II has accelerated significantly as the US began to rely on academia more than most other countries.
Essential to this system was Washington's new willingness to undertake overheads for expensive research projects. By 1995, the National Academy of Sciences had concluded that universities were the “core strength” of American research and development equipment. The university also envisions part of the US soft power strategy and is working on global foreign aid projects.
That symbiotic arrangement is currently at risk. The administration proposed reducing fictitious costs, for example, as a way to “ensure as much funding as possible directly covers scientific research costs.” But the administration also draws in harsh terms a long-standing framework, including claims that it created a “slash fund” for liberal university administrators.
As Dr. Geiger said, the Trump administration's approach represented a “new era.” In addition to dismissing individual studies, federal money cuts could unleash dramatic consequences on the structure and purpose of the university.
“The University of Kentucky has been a great professor to help students understand the importance of their efforts,” said John Terrin, professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky and former president of the Association for Research on Higher Education.
He could not consider a president, a provost or medical dean who had been particularly nervous about evaporating funds in recent years. These days it's hard to find a president, a provost, or a medical dean who doesn't worry about anything.
In Illinois, the federally funded soybean Innovation Lab will be closed next month. Dr. Jones fears that everything from insulin production to artificial intelligence will eventually wither and undermine the ability to advance what he calls “public good.”
“We used to try to tell our story to improve our value proposition in the public's eyes, but now it's become a much bigger issue,” said Dr. Jones, one of the few university chiefs interviewed on records since Trump took office.
This threat is keen even in civilian institutions, even those with the largest war chest. Johns Hopkins said last week that he would eliminate more than 2,000 jobs in the US and overseas. University of Pennsylvania, Trump's alma mater, is one of the universities where new jobs are frozen. (The Trump administration announced the previous step on Wednesday that he said it would suspend about $175 million in funding for Penn as it allowed trans women to compete on women's swimming teams.)
Over the past few weeks, presidents of public and private universities have weighed how long the institutional lifeline will last. However, the professor doubts that major universities can meet modern ambitions without a relatively open spigot of federal support.
“Ultimately, universities can't exist without research,” said Brent R. Stockwell, chairman of Columbia's biological sciences. “It's similar to a high school or local community college where world-class researchers just teach a few classes without bringing knowledge frontiers into the classroom.”
So far, Trump has shown no interest in retreats. It is essential for academic leaders who are urgently looking for ways to save the ideals they assert.
When asked if he was afraid of remakes of American college wholesale, Dr. Jones replied that he didn't like using the word “terror.” But he said, “That's a concern. I can't say it's not one of the things that many of us are worried about.”
Sharon Otterman contributed the report.
